Wednesday, August 01, 2007

If I can get four kids out of the house and in the car for a five and a half hour journey to Cornwall in forty minutes, I'll be very, very lucky. But that's my goal this morning, waking up teenagers and herding them into the overpacked and ancient Mondeo for camping near some of Cornwall's highest cliffs.

When I get back, I'll be able to focus on work, but I need some wild, windy coastline, which is so much more bearable when it's sunny. I've been promising to show the kids the coast I went to with my parents as a child and this is the time to do it, now the sun's out at last. But it will be changed, I'm sure. Padstow is now linked with Rick Stein rather than gritty sandwiches. Never mind, the Cornish names will still work their magic and we'll be a short cliff walk away from Tintagel.

And when I get back I want, also, to see if I can summon up some good feminist support for a protest. There are three lap dancing clubs due to open in Brighton, one's the Spearmint Rhino that will admit men and women, the other two are men only. Thoughts in my mind so far are for women to reclaim Spearmint Rhino from the dirty macs with reading group outings, knitting circles and loud discussion groups. For the men only clubs, I think women should dress up as men and take over the place. I wonder, too, if we could enlist support from gay male friends to make our protests.

Alternatively, and this would be radical and probably cause quite a bit of fuss, I think it would be very interesting to have a mass naked protest by women outside all these places and see what happens.